Xander dropped his hand and pulled away. “You should go.”
“We’ve got a lead.” Elias stepped into the kitchen. I watched his eyes move from me to Xander, then back to me.
Guilt rushed through me. I’d just kissed Elias outside and here I was with Xander’s legs on either side of me, my body pressed up against the table.
I stepped back in surprise. I hadn’t even noticed that I was in such an intimate position with him.What the fuck was wrong with me?
I didn’t rush into relationships. Shit, I rarely had them at all. What was I doing? This wasn’t good for my focus. I needed to ignore these males and get back to the task.
“Feel better,” I said to Xander, then I turned to Elias. “What did you find?”
His eyes were still on Xander. “One of my informants heard a vamp bragging about tasting a wolf princess.”
Xander growled. “He’s a dead man.”
“I’ve got this under control,” I said to Xander. “Please. Stay here.”
“This one,” he lifted his chin toward Elias, “is probably going to make you bring the bastard in alive.”
Elias walked past me and stopped in front of Xander. Tension hung thick in the air and I was worried I was going to have to break up a fight between them.
“Someone took my sister from me,” he said. “She was sold into slavery and beaten to death after years of abuse.”
I stared at him, unable to react. Everything inside me seemed to break for him. The pain in his voice was raw and real. I wanted to comfort him and destroy the people who were at fault at the same time.
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “And I will kill every single one of those slavers until there are none left.”
A shiver ran down my spine. This was the intensity I’d seen when we first met. The anger, the lack of remorse, the monstrous side of Elias.
“Then you understand,” Xander said.
“Better than you could ever know,” he said.
Elias’s phone dinged, breaking the stare down between the two of them. He glanced at the screen, then looked up at me. “We gotta go if we want to make it to the Clover Coven by nightfall.”
I tensed. “We have to solve this tonight. I don’t want to risk ending up in jail.”
“We better hurry,” Elias said.
I walked over to Xander and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.”
He grabbed my upper arm and pulled me closer, planting his lips on mine for a brief kiss. It was hard and fast and intense, even though it was short. I stumbled back from him, my whole body on fire.
“Be careful,” he said.
“I won’t let anything happen to her,” Elias said, then he turned and walked out of the room.
Xander let go of my arm and nodded at me. I nodded back, speechless for once.
As I followed Elias out of Shelly’s house, I touched my lips with my fingertips. I’d been kissed twice in the last hour and both kisses had sent my heart reeling and my head spinning.
If I survived this, I had some serious shit to work out.